MIND DE-CODER 32

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MIND DE-CODER 32

“Some of you guys may be uncool, and we may be getting busted tonight. Now I know the usual thing in clubs is to kind of throw everything on the floor. But we don’t want the fuzz to close UFO down. So, like, if you’re uncool, will you please go out, and come back when you’re cool.”

                                                                    Suzy Creamcheese

ARS NOVA     ZARATHUSTRA

…and we kick off a cosmic show with an intense psychedelic re-working of Also Sprach Zarathustra by American rock band, Ars Nova, who managed to record two albums in the 60’s before splitting following a disastrous performance supporting The Doors at the Fillmore East in mid-1968. Zarathustra is taken from their first album, ARS NOVA, released in 1968. 

The first 20 minutes or so of the show have been shamelessly plundered from a brilliant psychedelic mix I found on YouTube. I re-edited it for my own use but you should check out the original here. It's mind-bending to say the least.

APRYL FOOL     THE LOST MOTHER LAND PT.1

Apryl Fool were an extremely cool and long-haired Japanese rock group who released just the one album – a self-titled fairly half-hearted bar room post-Animals blues affair with the odd Dylan cover thrown in, released in 1969. Despite being cool and long-haired, the band would otherwise remain unremarkable were it not for the psychedelically unhinged The Lost Mother Land which, amidst the rest of the album, approached genuine meltdown. As Julian Cope laments of the album in his trusty JAPROCKSAMPLER, if only there’d been more of this magic in its grooves…

KALEIDOSCOPE     FLIGHT TO ASHIYA

Despite much radio play at the time, Kaleidoscope never achieved the kind of recognition they deserved and became, instead, one of the great unsung psychedelic bands of the 60’s. Flight To Ashiya was released as the lead single from their debut album TANGERINE DREAM, released 1967, but sadly, the record buying public weren’t interested in their dreamy, whimsical, psychedelic proto-prog sound and the album remains a cult pleasure amongst those of us who discovered it in later years.

PINK FLOYD     THE SCARECROW

…and speaking of psychedelic whimsy, here are Pink Floyd with a track from PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN, of course; perhaps the most pastoral and evocative of a certain kind of English psychedelia of them all. Recorded in one take, and released as the B-Side to See Emily Play in 1967, it strikes a peculiar meeting between innocence and sophistication that PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN carried off so perfectly.

GANDALF     CAN YOU TRAVEL IN THE DARK ALONE

You’d expect a band with a name like Gandalf to hail from some misty meadow in Cambridgeshire or the like, and have songs about elves and unicorns, but in fact they’re from new New Jersey and used to be called the unfortunately named Rahgoos, a garage-band specializing in cover versions, until the drummer read Lord of the Rings and suggested a name change and a subtle change of direction, resulting in the band writing a couple of their own songs and releasing a self-titled album in 1969. It’s generally a low key affair that enjoys some lovely psychedelic flourishes– you can play it at dinner parties without upsetting anyone – but it only features two self-penned songs, one of which is the lovely Can You Travel In The Dark Alone, the rest are an interesting selection of cover versions, including Nature Boy by Eden Ahbez.  They were badly let down by their record company, however, who released the album some two years after it was recorded in 1967, with the wrong record in the sleeve. After the album was recalled any interest in the band was long gone and that was pretty much that - these days, of course, GANDALF is a much sought after psychedelic artifact.

SAVAGE RESURRECTION     SOMEONE’S CHANGING

The Savage Resurrection were formed in 1967 in San Francisco, in the midst of the summer of love. Possibly the most remarkable thing about them was the age of their lead guitarist, who was only 16 at the time. They only released the one album, the self-titled SAVAGE RESURRECTION, released in 1968 – a punky, raw bluesy affair characterized by two guitarists whose duels would spew out fuzz and feedback; but they were also capable of spacier, folkier songs such as Someone’s Changing. As is often the case, the band split after one album before they could develop some of their ideas further, so we’ll never know just how good they could have been.

THE CHURCHILLS     SO ALONE TODAY

Now here’s something you don’t come across everyday: an Israeli psychedelic rock band that started in 1965 and lasted well into the 1970’s, head starting a nascent Israeli rock scene. The madly psychedelic So Alone Today is from their debut album CHURCHILLS, released in 1969. Can’t honestly say I know that much more about them.

HOUSE OF NIMROD     SLIGHTLY-DELIC

At long last, a New Zealand psychedelic group finally joins Mind De-Coder, though arguably they barely hung around long enough to be called a group. The semi-legendary House Of Nimrod formed in Auckland in 1967, began rehearsing a couple of songs by guitarist Bryce Petersen and released the slightly wonderful Slightly-delic as their first single a couple of weeks later. It garnered some radio play but the band were unable to tour because that song, and the B-side, were the only two songs they knew how to play, and Petersen was having way too much fun enjoying the gifts of the 60’s (as it were) to write anymore, so the band went in to semi-retirement.  Petersen eventually wrote a few more songs and the band released a second single in 1968 but it didn’t sell well and that was pretty that. Shortly after Petersen wrote the song Gracious Lady (Alice Dee) for NZ pop sensation Lew Pryme (see Mind De-Coder 36) but it was banned on the radio for its suggestible references to LSD.  THE HOUSE OF NIMROD EP collected all four of their songs and was released in 2000. The A-side runout quite rightly reads: “Acid is good for the mind?!!”

WHITE NOISE     HERE COME THE FLEAS

I’m a big fan of experimental electronics band White Noise, especially their first album, which included Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop in the line-up, but I’m usually drawn to their fractured pop songs on which they gleefully overlay musique concrète effects, weird bits of radio theatre, and long stretches of gothic horror which nowadays could be mistaken for a sort of proto-Hauntological approach to music making; so I thought I’d play Here Comes The Fleas, instead - the bizarrely ‘playful’ track from their 1969 debut AN ELECTRIC STORM.

THE LEFT BANKE     PRETTY BALLERINA

The Left Banke are more or less known for two tracks these days – Walk Away Renée and Pretty Ballerina, both of which made the charts in 1966, and resulted in the band releasing their debut album, the daringly titled WALK AWAY RENÉE/PRETTY BALLERINA in 1967. It was an album that pioneered a more artful use of strings in pop music, incorporating a small string section, harpsichord, and woodwinds to give their songs a light yet dramatic Baroque flavor that was unique in rock at the time, but internal divisions soon got the better of them and before too long they fell apart leaving little more than the two great singles, and the term ‘baroque ‘n’ roll’, to account for their ever being here.

LOVE     SHE COMES IN COLORS

I’m not a great fan of Love’s second album, DA CAPO, released in 1967, but really like She Comes In Colors, one of Arthur Lee’s loveliest songs (if you’ll pardon the unintended pun) - possibly because it points the way to the sound they were to fully explore on their next album, the gorgeous FOREVER CHANGES, which they would release later that year.

MESMERIZING EYE     SIDE 1

PSYCHEDELIA: A MUSICAL LIGHT SHOW, released in 1967 by The Mesmerizing Eye, is as about far out as it gets, or as one reviewer put it: “It’s a brain frying mindfuck – searing acid guitar, air raid sirens, crying babies, thunderstorms, telephones ringing and ringing, detuned marching bands staggering past…and all of that in the first few minutes”. 

It was created by two producers and a few studio freak musicians who played what tunes there are to fit around the sound effects, of which there are plenty. It’s a very short album; it barely last 25 minutes, and all the tracks run into each other: and I like it so much, I thought I’d play all of Side One which runs like this: 1)Birth Of A Nation, 2) Rain Of Terror, 3) Tempus Fugit, 4) Opus 71, 5) Twenty-First Century Express.

THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION    THE RETURN OF THE SON OF MONSTER MAGNET

…and speaking of brain frying mindfucks, here’s Frank Zappa and The Mothers Of Invention with a proper 13-minute freak out, taking up all of Side 4 of their debut album FREAK OUT!, released in 1967. The Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet is an experiment in musique concrète, amelodic dissonance, shifting time signatures, and studio effects that broke new ground in just what a rock LP could be capable of; introduced the world to the legendary Suzie Creamcheese, and was the first double album ever released, to boot.

THE FORMLESS DREAMER     PRAIRIE DOG

A bit of filler, really, from The Formless Dreamer, a psychedelic act about which the internet is deafeningly silent. I came across him (for I believe it to be a he) on You Tube where he seems to have provided the music for a 45-minute psychedelic head trip of a video called PSYCHEDELIC SALVIA TRIP MUSIC IV: THE BREAD OF GOD, which you can find here and you really ought check it out, not only is it very good, I suspect it’s the future.  So, I’m guessing this track is called Prairie Dog by The Formless Dreamer from the album THE BREAD OF GOD, which may have been made in 2011. Unless it’s made by Sage Bodisattva.

Or Both.

FRIENDSOUND     LOST ANGEL PROPER STREET

Friendsound seems to be at least three members of Paul Revere and the Raiders and a bunch of friends who got together for a pretty cosmic sounding jam session which they released as JOYRIDE in 1969. It largely taken up with instrumentals, but they’re full of studio experimentation, including backwards tapes, sound effects and lsd-inspired ramblings of which Lost Angel Proper Street is a very good example.

BOEING DUVEEN AND THE BEAUTIFUL SOUP     JABBERWOCK

Boeing Duveen and the Beautiful Soup only made the one single, the 1968 release Jabberwock, which remains one of the oddest psychedelic obscurities of that time. A slightly menacing and yet playful re-telling of the Lewis Carroll poem, it was backed by a gentle acid-folk recording that was completely at odds with the A-side (see Mind De-Coder 22). 

Boeing Duveen, of course (he said, for those of you that remember Mind De-Coder 22) was Sam Hutt, known to the British '60s counterculture as a "rock & roll doctor" who administered to rock musicians and practiced homeopathy and holistic medicine, as well as dealing with drug casualties at festivals. If this still isn’t ringing any bells, then you probably know him as Hank Wangford, who enjoyed a successful career playing Country and Western throughout the 80’s, and for all I know, still does.

And if that doesn’t ring any bells – then just enjoy the single.

LORD BUCKLEY    THE NAZ (excerpt)

I play around with some  backwards psychedelia and while that’s going on include the legendary Lord Buckley in the mix – Lord of Flip manor, Royal Holiness of the Far out, and prophet of the Hip (as one obituary sung of him) - a 50’s cat whose improvised jazz wordplay defined cool as having ‘the sweet fragrance of serenity’ and referred to Jesus as The Naz, calls him a ‘carpenter kittie’ who heals ‘a little cat with a bent frame’ and who implored us all to Dig Infinity, and we dug it.  This is just an excerpt from perhaps his most famous monologue, but if you’ve never come across this hipster saint and tongue dancer before, then check out, at the very least, LORD BUCKLEY IN CONCERT (1964), which was originally released as WAY OUT HUMOR in 1959, a year before his death, and prepare to be blown away.

MELODY’S ECHO CHAMBER     IS THAT WHAT SHE SAID

I’ve unfairly, perhaps, played this track from the debut album by classically trained French chanteuse Melody Prochet because she doesn’t appear to be on it very much – what you get instead is searing backwards guitars from Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, who collaborated and produced the eponymous album for her. Released in 2012, it’s an album of dreamy sonics and saccharine vocals (or the other way round – whatever you prefer) that creates a shimmering psychedelic gauze through which traces of dream-pop and shoegaze reverberate. But I played the backwards one where you can barely hear her. Oh, well, another show, perhaps.

FIFTY FOOT HOSE     GOD BLESS THE CHILD

50 Foot Hose are we’re choosing to call an avant-psychedelic group, whose only album CAULDRON, released in 1968, is an ambitious mix of contemporary rock sounds with electronic instruments and avant-garde compositional ideas that was never quite as good as you’d hope.  The album plays around with an intriguing fusion of jazzy psychedelic rock tunes with primitive electronic sound effects layered on top - eerie electronic swoops and jolts swam through the background and foreground of the tracks, enhanced by techniques like putting instruments through an FM transmitter. Ultimately, the jazzier and spookier tunes worked better than the bluesier hard rock items as exemplified on the Owsley-dosed coffeehousing of Billy Holliday’s God Bless The Child. Acoustic guitar and hissing jazz hi-hat and traps are surrounded by incongruous space whooshes and bleeps in a proto-synth, fifties sci-fi movie manner that makes the song sound as if it’s playing on an old-fashioned valve-fitted radiogram on a Russian space station.

FAR EAST FAMILY BAND     ENTERING/TIMES

Two tracks from the Far East Family Band that segue into each other on their 1976 album PARALLEL WORLD, released 1976. The Far East Family Band were a pleasingly obscure 1970’s Japanese psych-rock band whose sound was heavily influenced by Pink Floyd, and they specialised in long, multi-part pieces of music complete with all the trappings of the psychedelic era, up to and including crazy cosmic cover art; their nearest relatives these days would be Cranium Pie whose debut MECHANISMS owes quite a lot to PARALLEL WORLD, the band’s fourth album and masterpiece. It was produced by Krautrock legend and one-time Tangerine Dream member Klaus Schulze, and recorded at Manor Studios in the UK and is very much a full-on psychedelic odyssey of rare quality. Entering/Times begins with fluttering bird like sounds, drifts into a zone of cosmic ambient silence and ends with an extended acid freak-out. Marvellous.

CHEVAL SOMBRE     ONCE I HAD A SWEETHEART

MAD LOVE, released in 2012 by Cheval Sombre, a New Yorker by the name of Christopher Porpora, is one of the most unhurried records you will ever hear - soft acoustic guitar, organ and strings are made drowsy by a plethora of psychedelic effects, with every song slow in tempo, and generally just letting things happen. It features contributions from Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser of MGMT, Pete Kember of Spacemen 3 and Dean Wareham of Galaxie 500, all Mind De-Coder favourites and none of whom appear to make any difference at all to anything. Once I Had A Sweetheart, a well known traditional perhaps made most famous by Pentangle (see Mind De-Coder 4)is one of the loveliest songs on the album - the Cheval Sombre version is saturated in reverb yet the simplicity of this mesmerizing track shines through the haze. The distortion, however, does give it a glittering quality that permeates the whole record, elevating it to something meditative, entrancing, and gorgeously druggy. Lovely.

THE DUKES OF STRATOSPHEAR     MOLE FROM THE MINISTRY

XTC’s finest moment on their acid-laced homage to their psychedelic records of their past, Mole From The Ministry is the closing track on their 1985 album, released as the Dukes Of Stratosphear, 25 O’CLOCK, one of the greatest psychedelic albums ever released in its own right. Produced by the great John Leckie, 25 O’CLOCK plunders the psychedelic toy box and comes up with a brilliant, clever distillation of the sounds of 1967, filled with knowing allusions and outright thievery from psychedelic classics – it comes closer to pop-art than homage and is in every way a joyous celebration of everything Mind De-Coder stands for.

MIND DE-CODER 45

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MIND DE-CODER 45

“We must learn to translate both plants and stones in order to walk within ourselves”.

                 Friedrich Nietzche

TOY     CONDUCTOR

The opening track and one of several instrumentals from the second and most recent album from Toy, 2013’s JOIN THE DOTS, on which the band do just that – combining their influences from the first album into something pleasingly their own. 

GILA     THE BUFFALO ARE COMING

Gila were essentially a Krautrock act who, on their first album, were big on cosmic space jams but who eventually evolved into a post-Hosianna Mantra version of Popul Vuh. This is the album they released between those two incarnations – BURY ME HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE, released in 1973, an album clearly inspired by the book of the same name by Dee Alexander Brown that presented to the world for the first time the genocidal policies that were at the centre of the United States treatment of its indigenous population. Clearly affected by what he read, band founder Conny Veit created an album of haunting, shimmering dream-like psychedelia, combining Native American influences with beautiful vocal harmonies and acoustic acid-folk flourishes. 

THE NAZZ     OPEN MY EYES

A classic garage-punk single from 1967 with Todd Rundgren’s acid fuzz guitar barely disguising the fact that this was a band clearly enthralled with English power pop acts and Beatle’s inspired melodies. It should have been a massive hit for the band but didn’t even make the top 100, although Rundgren was able to forge a career out of the b-side, Hello It’s Me which became a worldwide hit some years later.

ORANGE MACHINE     REAL LIFE PERMANENT DREAM

This an excellent cover of Tomorrow’s Real Life Permanent Dream from little known Irish outfit Orange Machine who managed to release two singles before fading away into psychedelic obscurity. They should have been a lot bigger - check out that terrific lead guitar riff by Robin Crowley - but sadly exist barely as a footnote in musical history.  This is the b-side to the debut single, Three Jolly Little Dwarfs, released in 1968 and also a cover of a track by Tomorrow.

THE PEEP SHOW    MAZY

Another act lost to the 60’s - The Peep Show existed for a couple of years, produced a couple of singles and then disappeared from whence they’d come, having left behind one classic single from which to remembered by, if they’re remembered at all. Such is the case of The Peep Show who  left us the single Mazy, recorded in 1967, and generally regarded as something of a psychedelic classic despite having a slightly pessimistic tone to it that marks it as slightly out of place in an otherwise swinging London.

MIDWICH YOUTH CLUB     FROM THE CITY TO THE COUNTRY PT. 5 

Despite arriving wearing impeccable Hauntological credentials – the echoes of John Wyndham’s classic puts the Midwich Youth Club in the same psycho-geographic territory as The Belbury Poly, and there are subtle Radiophonic Workshop incidentals throughout the recording - this is an album that owes more to a prog sensibility. FROM THE CITY TO THE COUNTRY, FROM THE COUNTRY TO THE SEA, released earlier this year by multi-instrumentalist Allan R. Murphy, is essentially two long tracks each split into five parts that describes the journey of ‘a recently departed spirit attempting to reach the place they were happiest in their life, as a child on the beach at dusk, so as to be able to depart peacefully’. Broadcasting from New Zealand, of course, I’m put in mind of the Maori myth of spirits travelling north along country to depart on the voyage from its northernmost tip at Cape Reinga. Now, sitting on the beach at Cape Reinga watching oceans collide while the air above is filled with the souls of departing spirits – that’s a place to take a trip.

JIM WILLIAMS     BALOO MY BOY

Anyone who has seen Ben Wheatley’s mind-bending psychedelic British horror film A FIELD IN ENGLAND will recognise the sweet Baloo My Boy (based upon the Scottish folk tune Lady Anne Bothwell’s Lament, fact fans) from the film’s soundtrack, produced by Jim Williams, whose music very much defines the uneasiness produced by the film. The first half of the film produces instrumentation the characters could have played themselves (actor Richard Glover’s rustic yet endearingly lovely rendition of the song will not be forgotten by those who have seen the film), but as the film descends into mushroom induced madness the music becomes electronic and psychedelic, channelling a menacing elemental Krautrock vibe influenced by the likes of Tangerine Dream or Ash Ra Tempel at their most ambient and far-out. The soundtrack, like the film, is a trip that lingers long in the mind.

TEMPLES     A QUESTION ISN’T ANSWERED

A Question Isn't Answered can be found on the band’s debut release, SUN STRUCTURES, an album that has garnered some mild criticism for not being far-out enough. In capturing a specific snapshot of a particular period of English psychedelia between, ooh, say 1967 to 1968, the album is a delight and never less than hummingly tuneful, but what Temples really need to do now is find a way beyond the reverential production and simply wig out. A Question Isn’t Answered points the way.

FINGATHING     HAZE

Far-flung funky vibes from Manchester based instrumental hip hop duo Fingathing whose 2002 release SUPERHERO MUSIC is all about the scratch and the bass. Somehow they find an unlikely meeting point between turntablist dexterity and upright double-bass pluckings, combining the skills of hip hop DJ Peter Parker and classically trained double bass player Sneaky, which they somehow turn into a compelling mix of tripped-out jazzed-in psychedelic going’s-on.

JAMES McKEOWN     RHIZOMATIC

Sublime acid folk offering from James McKeown, an artist who creates ambient hauntological sounds of an almost quintessential Englishness that are both timeless and druidic in nature. Rhizomatic is taken from the album SUBLIME KNIGHT ELECT, released last year and inspired by astronomy, masonic ritual, alchemy and Neolithic ceremonial sites cast using a palette of acoustic and electric guitars, bass, ebow, and various keyboards, synths and tape manipulators – in other, operating well within Mind De-Coder territory, so you can expect him to be all over future shows.

SUNFOREST     MAGICIAN IN THE MOUNTAIN

Sunforest were a short-lived acid folk outfit comprised of three American’s who arrived in London in 1969, decided to form a band and were discovered almost immediately before they’d even recorded a note. Inexplicably two of their recordings ended up on Stanley Kubrick’s soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange, and both can be found on their only THE SOUND OF SOUNFOREST, released in 1969, which features ornate baroque vocals, novelty children’s songs, music hall numbers and the jazz-tinged folk work-out Magician In The Mountain. The album was too eclectic to appeal to any one taste and with poor record sales the band split shortly thereafter but Magician In The Mountain remains as fine an example of the genre as you’re ever likely to hear.

JULIAN COPE     KELLY

Cope’s DROOLIAN album, on which the weirdly likable Kelly can be found, was originally released in Texas only in order to raise funds for 13th Floor Elevator frontman Roky Erikson who, following years of involuntary shock treatment in a Houston Psychiatric Hospital for having been in possession of a single marijuana joint, had taken to collecting his neighbours mail and sellotaping it to the wall. I’ve no idea if the record raised any money or not (Cope’s name was not to be found anywhere on the sleeve), and in any case the charges were later dropped on account of Erikson not actually having opened any of the mail (sorry, is this too much information?), but I found the record in Virgin Records along Oxford Street  - how it got there I don’t know, but for some time it was a prized possession until it finally saw a CD release in England a few years or so ago. It’s a very lo-fi affair, in much the same vein as Skellington, if not even looser, but it’s the sound of Copey clearly enjoying himself in the studio following some contractual disagreements with his then record company Island Records and we Cope fans tend to like it for its playfulness as much as anything else.

D.D. DENHAM     TONIGHT, WE DANCE AMONG THE STARS

Electronic noodlings that rather fittingly sound as if they’re being beamed in from outer space but which can actually be found on ELECTRONIC MUSIC IN THE CLASSROOM by D.D. Denham who may be a pseudonym for The Advisory Circle’s Jon Brooks, or who may well be a teacher who taught music to children in schools in the mid-70’s  and who released the results to the parents of the children involved on limited edition of reel-to-reel tapes that Brooks has patiently, if not obsessively, sourced and released on his own Café Kaput label – the provenance is unclear and it may be a hauntological sleight of hand, or joke. All of which works for me. 

LANA DEL REY     ONCE UPON A DREAM

I, for one, am as surprised as anyone that Lana Del Rey has popped up twice now on Mind De-Coder, but there is something about her interpretation of the tune from the 1959 Disney classic Cinderella that works for me on so many levels…

DELIA DERBYSHIRE AND BARRY BERMANGE        COLOURS

Colours is the final movement from a remarkable album called DREAMS, produced by Delia Derbyshire, from the Radiophonic Workshop, in collaboration with poet and dramatist Barry Bermange in 1964. On this ground-breaking record (The Beatles would have been working on A HARD DAY'S NIGHT round about this time) Bermange recorded people talking about their dreams and spliced them together creating a collage of five suites that generally reflect some of the major themes associated with dreaming – running away, falling, landscape, underwater and colours. The results were given to Derbyshire who added a background of pure electronic musique concretè sound which was often dissonant, big on ring modulators and distinctly uneasy to listen to. Altogether it makes for a strange journey through the subconscious, and more or less invented the hauntological template.

THE ECCENTRONIC RESEARCH COUNCIL FT. MAXINE PEAKE     MAXINE’S DREAM

Inspired by the above, experimental sound design duo The Eccentronic Research Council reunited with actress Maxine Peake, with whom they last worked on the 1612 UNDERTURE – an album inspired by the Pendle witch trials - and recorded Maxine’s Dream, in which she recounts a dream about a last minute flight to Ibiza while the boys provide a suitably dissonant soundtrack. It was released last year as a seven inch single. Marvellous.

LINDA PERHACS     PRISMS OF GLASS

Back in 1970, former dental technician and acid folk love-child Linda Perhacs produced one of the most outré, sublimely gorgeous albums ever recorded, containing at least two tracks, and I’m thinking of Chimacum Rain and the title track Parallelograms here, which were almost transcendentally spell-binding – sadly, nobody bought it and she returned to her day job and for the best part of forty years that was that. In the meantime, and rather like Vashti Bunyan’s semi-mythical album JJUS ANOTHER DIAMOND DAY, her album slowly grew in legend and eventually was held as a cult classic amongst the newly emergent Freak Folk scene in the United States. And, like Vashti Bunyan, she has taken the unlikely step of recording a new album; the result, THE SOULS OF ALL NATURAL THINGS, recorded 44 years after her debut, was released earlier this month. Once again it demonstrates that Perhacs sees and hears things differently to the rest of us, and despite the gap, the album is a natural successor to the first – inspired by a solar eclipse, it contains the same lushly psychedelic folk atmosphere and a deep consciousness of spirituality in everyday things – Prisms of Glass, recorded with Julia Holter is every bit the equal of Chimacum Rain and Parallelograms.  Lovely.

WALTER WEGMÜLLER     DER WAGEN

Walter Wegmüller, a Swiss born mystic, teamed up with the Cosmic Jokers in 1973 to record an absolute Krautrock classic – the legendary TAROT is an epic interpretation of the tarot cards that can induce a trip of mind bending proportions, under the right circumstances. I have no idea of which card Der Wagen is referring to with this track, however – is there one called ‘The Dare’? 

NICK NICELY     LONDON SOUTH

Nobody does psychedelia quite like nick nicely. This is the closing track from his most recent album LYSERGIA, released in 2011 on tape cassette, whereon it pretty much does what it says on the label. 

ANAN     I WONDER WHERE MY SISTER’S GONE 

Another band that existed just long enough to record just a couple of singles before disappearing back into the psychedelic mysts of tyme (©) , Anan were more or less unknown even back then. I Wonder Where My Sister’s Gone is the b-side to their first single, released in 1968 and not even rating a cover from the record company, but is a superb, mind-bending track that comes smelling of patchouli oil wrapped up in paisley rags. But in a good way.

BEAULIEU PORCH     LOVE 80

Beaulieu Porch is the moniker under which British musician Simon Berry produces a particularly English brand of pastoral psychedelic pop that puts me in mind the kind of b-sides that The Beatles were releasing during their own psychedelic period; experimental, baroque and full of bubbling pop hooks . Love 80 can be found on an introductory album that combines tracks from two earlier now out of prints albums released last year by The Active Listener, a download site that champions releases of a psychedelic, acid folk, prog nature so, as you can imagine, it’s right up my street.  Check them out here.

KEITH WEST     EXCERPT FROM A TEENAGE OPERA

The salutary tale of Grocer Jack was all over the summer of 1967 and was only kept of the number one slot by Englebert Humperdink, of all people. Conceived by record producer Mark Wirtz, it was decided to call it Excerpt from a Teenage opera to imply there was more coming along – at some point it was even rumoured that there would be a West End production starring Cliff Richard – but it was not to be. Singer Keith West from psychedelic rock band and Mind De-Coder favourite Tomorrow provided lyrics and vocals, and fellow band member Steve Howe, who also went on to become a founder member of Yes, played guitar and it quickly became the defining sound of the Summer of Love. Sadly, work on A Teenage Opera caused an acrimonious split within Tomorrow so we never got to find out just how good they could have become.

TEETH OF THE SEA     CEMETERY MAGUS

Teeth Of The Sea are a spectacular London based psychedelic act who produced an enormously impressive second album with the release of YOUR MERCURY in 2010. It genuinely sounds like nothing I’ve heard before, collapsing cathedral like swathes of sound into a warped prog rock sense of experimentation and has a scope that sweeps all before it. Cemetery Magus creeps out of its enchanted intro and builds into something all mad trumpets and tom toms before returning to a state that reminds me of an out-take from the Wicker Man soundtrack if Delia Derbyshire had been asked to contribute. Fittingly, then, the band are to release a specially recorded 3-track limited edition re-interpretation of the soundtrack to A Field In England for this year’s Record Shop day, which I’m looking forward to immensely.

MOON WIRING CLUB     BOUTIQUE SPOOKY

A fairly irresistibly titled track from the most recent album by Ian Hodgson’s Moon Wiring Club, A FONDNESS FOR FANCY HATS, released 2013. The album is presented as the soundtrack for an imaginary old skool computer game, from which you might never emerge. Hodgson writes: “Lost inside your own mind palace, the objective is to locate the fanciest of fancy hats and retire to a dreamy garden party, where you can effortlessly display this magical titfer”. It’s a whole confusing world to explore.

HERON     LORD AND MASTER

Like several bands in that post-psychedelic era of 1969-1973-ish, Heron retired to the countryside and settled in the village of Appleford, Berkshire, to record their debut album, HERON, released in 1970. They set their equipment up in a, no doubt, delightful meadow next to the river Thames and recorded the album in one take, the surrounding ambiance of bird song and buzzing insects adding a gentle pastoral tranquillity to the results. It really is quite lovely.

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